Indelible Ink
by Lady-of-the-Refrigerator
Summary: When the sickly yellow-green digits on her alarm clock switched from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM, her tattoo started to appear across the middle of her right forearm, just past the edge of her scar. Most people's tattoos were inked on their skin in simple black or blue, but hers was a bright, vivid red. [Soulmate AU, Ch 2/2]
1. Chapter 1

Quick response a prompt going around on tumblr: "_soulmate AU where you wake up on your 18th birthday with the first words your soulmate will say to you tattooed on your body so you'll know them when you meet them_". A chapter from Red's POV will come at some point in the future.

* * *

Liz remembered her 18th birthday as if it were yesterday. By the time midnight rolled around, she had been almost sick with anticipation. She locked her bedroom door, made sure no light from the streetlights leaked around her curtains, and stripped down in front of the mirror to wait.

When the sickly yellow-green digits on her alarm clock switched from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM, her tattoo started to appear across the middle of her right forearm, just past the edge of her scar. Most people's tattoos were inked on their skin in simple black or blue, but hers was a bright, vivid red. She traced over the words, wondering at their significance, at the context they would be spoken in.

In the years that followed, there were days she loved the tattoo, not because of the promise of her soulmate, but because it meant she would make it through the trials she faced, that she would become the agent she had always dreamt of being. It was a comfort, a reassurance in her darkest hours.

There were days she hated it, too, because the surname it addressed wasn't hers, not yet, and the implications were clear enough for her: she would marry a man who wasn't her soulmate before she even got a chance to meet him.

For ages, she worried about why. Would she become impatient waiting for her soulmate to cross her path? Would she settle for something less than a real, true love out of necessity or convenience, or were there extenuating circumstances?

The day she met Tom, she tried to scrub the words from her body. The day she started falling for him, she resolved to have the tattoo removed. The day she married him, it slowly began to reappear, letter by letter.

He told her it was OK, that he gouged his own out in the weeks after his parents died because true love couldn't guarantee happiness and he wanted nothing to do with it. He even showed her the scar. It looked fresher than it should have, but she figured if her tattoo could come back after she had it removed, his scar might very well not heal properly.

No one knew very much about how the tattoos worked, after all. She refused to let those five short words influence her feelings for her husband or her opinion of him. They were nothing but an inconsequential string of letters as far as she was concerned. Her soulmate, whoever he was, had come too late.

So she settled into a comfortable life with Tom, complete with a dog and a house and dreams of starting a family. Every day that went by without anyone uttering those fateful words gave her more hope it would never happen, that this life she'd chosen for herself was the right one, soulmate or no. She was happy with Tom. She had to be.

That is until the day she was due to begin the job she worked so hard for, when her already hectic morning was interrupted by a helicopter and an FBI escort and the demands of an infamous criminal who refused to speak with anyone but her.

The lines of her tattoo burned as she walked towards the man, shackled to his chair. The words buzzed in her head in time with the blaring siren. Somehow—_somehow_—she knew before he even opened his mouth that it would be him. The suspense tightened her chest, each second he stared at her in transfixed silence making it more and more difficult to breathe. He was late, all right, but he sure knew how to make an entrance.

At long last, he opened his mouth and gave a soft, breathy laugh.

"Agent Keen, what a pleasure."


	2. Chapter 2

Red never put much stock into the tattoos or the concept of soulmates.

As far as he was concerned, the whole system was flawed, illogical, impractical. He hadn't even thought of his tattoo in years when it came time to turn himself over to the FBI, the words no more than a curiosity to keep him occupied when he had quite literally nothing else to hold his attention. Contemplating fate and soulmates was all well and good while being held captive somewhere against his will without any other distractions, but in day to day life, it seemed rather foolish.

He carried his tattoo for over thirty years with nary a peep, after all. He hardly could have put his life on hold to wait for his soulmate. It occurred to him fleetingly only as Lizzy opened her mouth to speak that she would be the one to finally say the words to him and in that instant, everything changed. For him as much as for her, if not more so.

"You know, you keep trying to stab me whenever I'm in need of a quick getaway and people are going to get the wrong idea," he said, taking a sip of his scotch before casually turning around to find her slowly sneaking her way across the room towards him.

Dembe came rushing through the door moments later with Luli right on his heels. His jaw was starting to swell as if he'd been punched and Red eyed Lizzy curiously; she returned his gaze without so much as a flinch, looking so straight-backed and defiant he had to suppress the crazy, reckless urge to go down on one knee and propose to her right then and there.

"I need to talk to you. Alone," she said. When Dembe made a move to grab her arm, she continued, "I promise I won't try to kill you again."

He nodded, though he was hardly worried. The pen in his neck not only confirmed he'd made the right choice with her, it energized him in ways he never anticipated. When she had tried to stab him with a fork as he reached for her hand across the table in Montreal, he knew he was a lost cause. Even today, as she made a lunge for him across the backseat of his car before Luli could pull her away, he felt a surge of admiration and fondness for her. She kept attacking him because his mere existence cast so much confusion and doubt over her life that she didn't know any other way to react. He didn't blame her for it.

Dembe and Luli stood close to her like she was an imminent threat to him, and perhaps she was, just not in the way they thought. He didn't expect them to understand what was going on between him and Lizzy; they were missing a key piece of information, one he wasn't willing to provide.

"Go on, then," he said, waving his bodyguards off.

"But Raymond—"

"Search her if you feel you have to, but I want you to leave us. Now."

Lizzy continued to hold his gaze while Luli half-heartedly patted her down. It wasn't terribly necessary and everyone knew it; if she truly came here to hurt him, she wouldn't need a real weapon to do it.

After the door clicked shut behind Dembe and Luli, Lizzy wasted no time addressing the elephant in the room.

"Look, you and I both know what we are to each other and, frankly, it's insulting to our intelligence to keep dancing around it, so let's just get it out in the open right away. For some godforsaken reason, you're my soulmate and there's nothing we can do to change that. But you couldn't possibly have known before we met and that means there's more to connect us than the tattoos."

"More than soulmates," he said, lips quirking into a smile; she frowned. "I like the sound of that."

"Don't flatter yourself. You look at me like I'm supposed to fall in love with you and throw myself at your feet, but it's not going to happen. I have a husband. Who you tried to have murdered, I might add. And trying to have someone's spouse killed is a terrible way to establish trust."

"I'm a criminal, Lizzy, and I spend most of my time interacting with other criminals. I'm used to establishing fear, not trust. I'm bound to slip up every once in a while."

"Well, you better start relearning some appropriate behavior if you want to keep working with me."

She looked at him like he had two heads when he chuckled. Appropriate behavior may not be his strong suit, but, really, it wasn't hers either.

"At the risk of provoking another attempt on my life, I'm afraid it's much too early in our acquaintance for me to trust you with the information you're asking for."

"_You_ don't trust _me_?"

"Have you given me any reason to?" She flushed and looked away for the first time. "May I see it?"

"I already showed you my sc—"

He shook his head, impatient.

"Not your scar. Your tattoo," he clarified. She had indeed shown him her scar when he asked her to, but she'd done it so skittishly that it made him wonder if she burned the words of her tattoo off her wrist. Now that they'd acknowledged their link, his curiosity refused to be silenced. "May I see it? I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

She sputtered and blushed deeper, offended by the innuendo in his comment, but her eyes began to roam surreptitiously over his person in spite of herself, her own curiosity piqued. Taking some comfort in the fact that she didn't refuse outright, he began to slowly unbutton his vest, giving her ample time to stop him; she didn't move a muscle or utter a single word, just stared unblinking at his hands.

He loosened his tie and started on his shirt, watching her watch his every move. He pulled his shirt very carefully to the side, exposing just enough of the left side of his chest for her to see her own words spelled out across his skin.

_Well, I'm here._

She took an unconscious step forward so she could read them better, hidden as they were amongst the faded designs he had inked on his skin, just above a scarred-over bullet wound. She reached out to trace them before she could stop herself and once she touched his skin, he could actually see her make the decision to continue the contact rather than pull away.

"That must have been a close call."

He huffed a laugh. It certainly had been. Just a few inches lower and the bullet would have torn through his heart.

"One of many," he said. "The recovery was hell on earth. You never realize how much you use your left arm until you can't."

Her fingers started drifting, tracing the ink up to his shoulder. He gently closed his hand around her wrist before she could reach the skin still covered by his shirt and she blinked up at him, almost disoriented, as if she'd forgotten where she was.

"Your turn," he whispered. His thumb followed her scar as he pushed up her sleeve and he caught a glimpse of the edge of a bright red letter A just when he was about to give up hope. A strange relief washed over him as he uncovered the rest of the tattoo and read his own words across her forearm, plain as day.

"So you didn't burn it off."

"No," she breathed. She bit her lip, watching him run his thumb along the red ink. "I, um—I tried to have it removed professionally a couple years ago, but it came back just as strong."

"Hmm."

"What do you think it means, to be someone's soulmate? Why is it so… _important_?"

"I don't know. We're on even ground with this."

Cautiously, carefully, he brought her arm up and pressed his lips to her tattoo. A shiver ran through her and she pulled her hand away.

"I have to go," she said, but she didn't immediately push past him to leave like he expected. Instead, she buttoned his shirt and cinched his tie so it sat snugly around his neck, then reached to smooth and straighten his collar, folding it down around his tie, her fingers cool against his skin where they slipped underneath the fabric. He felt his heart beat against them as they lingered at his neck.

"I won't try to kill you again. I won't."

"That's good. If you did, I'd probably fall in love with you."

She blinked in surprise and swallowed hard, slowly withdrawing her hands from his chest and lowering her arms to her sides.

"I think you should probably have your head examined," she said, tugging her sleeve back down over her forearm.

"I think you're probably right," he said, lips twitching into a sheepish sort of smile. The notion was, quite frankly, rather deranged; he was secure enough in himself to admit that.

He watched her turn to leave, a dull ache settling into his chest.

"Be careful with Tom, Lizzy," he called after her.

Her brows furrowed as she frowned back at him. He braced himself for an argument, another staunch defense of her husband, but instead she gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.

Well. That was really all he could ask for at this point, wasn't it?


End file.
